We are always talking about how PPC is such an important piece to your overall hotel marketing strategy and Google has just added some more ammo to our PPC arsenal. Some of these features we’re about to cover have been out for a while, but they’re so underutilized that we felt we needed to get the word out.
Google Ads New Responsive Search Ads
This is easily one of the most exciting new features we’ve seen in Google Ads in quite some time. Google has now made ad testing way easier with these new responsive search ads, which are still in beta. We are now allowed to write up to 15 different headlines and up to 4 different descriptions. Google will then automatically serve different combinations of headlines and descriptions until it finds the best combination for a given searcher at a given time based on machine learning. We recommend filling up as many of these fields as you can for optimal testing opportunities.
Not only are these responsive search ads huge for ad testing, they also offer a lot of additional SERP real estate. Google released Expanded Text Ads in 2016, which allowed us a second headline and combined the two 35-character description fields into one 80 character description field. That was almost double the size of the original Adwords text ads. The PPC world went crazy over this new opportunity. Well, guess what? They did it again. We now have up to three 30-character headlines and two 90 character descriptions. That’s an additional headline and an additional description with 10 more characters in each description!
They also offer the option to “pin” a headline so you can guarantee it will be used anytime an ad is served. For instance, if you know you want to test ads that contain your brand name in a headline, or you want your brand name to be the first headline every time, you can “pin” it and you’ll always have your brand show, or always show in a certain position of your choosing.
One thing to note is that searchers will not always see 3 headlines and 2 descriptions. If you’re serving on a crowded SERP, or if your ad is serving on a smaller mobile device, you may only see 2 headlines and 1 description. The good thing at least it will never be less than that.
With all of this new space and the addition of machine learning testing, we are looking at a new frontier when it comes to text ads. Now we’ll have to see how BingAds responds. If the past is any indication I’d imagine they follow suit fairly quickly. Check back later for our findings on our initial tests. Visit Google Ads Help to learn more about responsive search ads.
Observation & In-Market Audiences for Hotel PPC
The next thing you hotel marketers need to start using is Observation Audiences. This feature essentially allows you to observe how an audience would perform for your ads without actually restricting the reach of your current campaign. For example, you can set up an Observation Audience for searchers who are looking for trips to a particular area.
